


Symptom Management (The Triage Delay)

by Maerhys



Category: American Idol RPF
Genre: M/M, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-15
Updated: 2012-03-15
Packaged: 2018-05-11 11:44:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5625460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maerhys/pseuds/Maerhys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Kris only remembers: I love you, but I don't love you like that. </em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Symptom Management (The Triage Delay)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [From the Moment](https://archiveofourown.org/works/43730) by [Jerakeen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jerakeen/pseuds/Jerakeen). 



What Kris remembers: the traffic jam started with a yellow bug (a Volkswagen with flower decals on the windows), his jammed iPod that had "Broken Open" on repeat, and watching the muscle car slide into the Mercedes sedan in slow motion until the air bags filled the with white balloons. Everything is a blur after the sharp, pulled focus of the skid, screech, crash. There may have been a knock on his window, someone asking him to drive his car over onto the shoulder to allow the medics room to maneuver and set-up triage. A whirling sound like an attic fan. Life Flight. An ambulance in Los Angeles during rush hour is the same as a death sentence. He's sure he's heard that before, and it has to be the truth because people don't lie about important stuff like medics in helicopters, glass littering the beltway, and his inability to turn the damned iPod off.

— — —

The head-on collision with the semi-truck that happens a mile behind him doesn't ping his radar. Kris definitely doesn't realize that an 18-wheeler had plowed into a string of cars; a pile-up that includes a car remarkably similar to his own.

— — —

When the officers approach the driver-side window for his statement, Kris does not tell them about the yellow bug taking up the better part of both lanes or that the muscle car must have been going at least twenty over the speed limit to crush the sedan; he doesn't even tell them that he saw it all happen. Instead Kris shows the officers the jammed iPod that he's pounding against the palm of his hand and he tells them that his radio works just fine, but it's his best friend's new single so he needs it to start working again. He thinks that he might be babbling when he shares that he feels guilty for listening to the song is on his ipod because it's not helping Adam's radio numbers. Kris pauses. He hadn't thought of radio stats but now he will. Kris assures them that he will take radio play into consideration because it's an important aspect of marketing a single. The officers glance at once another before they ask him to step out of the car.

When Kris finds himself in one of the ambulances that made it through the maze of parking lot traffic, he's not sure why he's there so he is insistent that the medic tell him what is wrong. Maybe he was too close to the crash, because he feels scooped out, hollow, and near tears. Did someone die, did he die? No, he's fine, right? The medic asks him to lie back down on the gurney (he thinks that's what it's called, a stretcher sounds too much like what they use for—) and she smoothes his hair back with her cool, brown hand. She's as dark as Katy is fair but he calls her Katy because every woman seems to be Katy these days. She responds by calling him Mr. Allen, which can't be right. He tries to shrug himself back up into a sitting position but he gets caught in a line of thin tubing that is fastened to the inside crook of his arm with a tiny needle.

"It's just fluids and lipids," she says, a smile hovering at the corner of her mouth. "You're dehydrated, Mr. Allen and by the look of your sallow skin and the five-pound bags under your eyes, it looks like you've not been eating or you're in the final week of a master cleanse."

Kris laughs and decides that he likes her because she knows he's Kris Allen but she didn't say a word about his divorce. His divorce — as if it belongs to him alone, but maybe it does and he said he was willing to bear it for both of them. "Been a long few weeks," he says with a slight slur. He can't be sure if Katy The Medic omitted that she was also sending a sedative down his line or if he really is this far around the bend; one is as likely as another. He decides to let it go and pulls at the thin blanket covering him from feet to waist. His mouth forms all of the words to "Broken Open" but he keeps the song below a whisper. He already shares enough of Adam with everyone else.

— — —

The dream is on replay again and it is always gray. He tells Adam that he will take anything but the gray. Adam stares over his shoulder into the monochrome horizon. Kris reaches out for Adam, declaring everything that doesn't need to be said but must be said or they'll never move forward. The scene clips by and Kris is silent; Adam has his back to him and Kris is trying to stop Adam from saying it, but, like all confessions, someone must be there to hear them and grant absolution. Adam says it in so many words but Kris only remembers: _I love you, but I don't love you like that_. Kris nods because he's not sure what the right response is when you're in love with someone and they love you too, but in ways that you don't understand. Adam always fades into the landscape and Kris drowns in a loneliness that floods over him, sinking inside the crests of gray waves.

— — —

When the medics pass him off to the emergency room staff, he gets flagged as a trauma patient and shipped up to the fifth floor. Hysterical laughter bubbles up into his throat but comes off as in a twisted, painful face. Kris follows the nurse's commands in a rote pattern of undressing, slipping on the paper gown, and getting into the narrow cot that serves as a bed. _Trauma_ , as if they have a clue how he's been traumatized, and it's all been trouble he brought on himself, starts an IV and something about a bolus to be added in a moment. Shaking his hands at the nurses, Kris mumbles that he never should have assumed that Adam felt the same way, that the in-jokes during interviews were more than friendly flirting, or that taking out a mortgage in the other's personal space was more than comfort and celebration that they were safe for another week. He pinches the thin skin at the star of his wrist bone to keep from falling asleep.

— — —

A few hours later, Kris slides back into his clothes and coffee is the only thing on his mind. The brain cracks reorganize, come together so that he can form cohesive thoughts, and Kris cringes at his previous shares with the medical staff. His phone vibrates before he picks it up and sees that his publicist has called ten times and his new PA just a little over half of that; he turns it off and pushes it deep into his pocket. He meanders around the med carts and rolling desks topped with laptops and into a sterile waiting room composed of an old RCA TV without a remote and a Nescafé instant coffee machine. The TV news talk mingles with the sound of the steaming water hitting a brown powder the machine passes off as a coffee regular. Kris kicks the toe of his sneaker against the machine softly to the tempo of the song he's writing. The paper cup sags under its weight and the waxy coating sweats over his hand, but he drinks the lukewarm swill in huge gulps. If a bit dribbles onto his chin, he can be forgiven because the TV finally catches his wandering attention.

_Former American Idol Kris Allen was allegedly involved in a head-on collision with a semi-truck from an unknown company this morning. Bystanders have reported that he has been taken to a local Pasadena hospital and the extent of his injuries are unknown at this time. Stay tuned for more coverage of this tragic multi-car pile-up that has claimed at least three lives at the scene._

"What the—" he says aloud to the room. The highway is on fire; the flames refract off the gush of water from the trucks' hoses until the asphalt is a crest of black ice. Kris takes in the flickering scenes of a semi-truck crashed into a car that looks exactly like the one he keeps here in L.A. There are several ambulances, two more fire trucks off to the side but on the ready, and at least one helicopter. It's a scene straight out of a bad end-of-the-world movie. He shakes his head at the screen, nudging closer to the television with each new second of film. When his forehead collides with the sharp corner of the tv set, Kris realizes that his only real injury is the laceration above his eye. Lucky to get out alive if he considers the catastrophe and what might have happened. Kris is all too aware that he spends most of his days wondering about what might have happened if— well, if things were different. He pats the bandage back over his eyebrow and attempts to muster up a declaration to live his life in this reality. Somehow it sounds hollow before he even bothers to form the words.

— — —

Kris is sprawled out in a plywood and plastic bucket seat in front of the TV news when he hears Adam scream. _Scream_ is not technically the word, but it seems to be the best shorthand for Adam raising his voice yet still managing a threatening tone that emanates from low in his throat. Kris peeks around the archway and sees that Adam has his large hands planted on the information desk to keep him from falling into the secretary whom he's nose to nose with while demanding information.

More than Adam showing up at the hospital with demands and a princely attitude that isn't him at all, Kris is stunned that Adam looks, well, disheveled. Not purposefully disheveled either like when he carefully musses his hair or leaves his fly half open to keep his fans wondering where Adam's coming from or _who_ he's just left behind. From several feet away, Kris notes his greasy hair, haphazardly tucked under a knit hat but peeking out over his ears and laying in strings against his neck. His clothes are rumpled and look more like something he'd have worn to a job interview pre- _Idol_ than anything he'd even think about keeping in the back of his closet now.

"I don't care that I am not family— I am as good as so tell me where the hell he is right now or I will start searching the place myself." Adam seems to move in closer and grow exponentially with each clipped word. Kris catches the security detail that must have lost Adam somewhere between the car and the fifth floor step back now that they have found him. For a trauma unit, Kris notices, it is conspicuously empty; he has a feeling that Adam may have something to do with the sudden flight.

He takes another step forward, the same pull and tug that always keeps him tethered to Adam is still there. With some thing like gravel in his throat, Kris manages to say, "Adam, I'm right here. Stop terrorizing this poor lady like some Godzilla."

Adam's eyes are deep with a wildness that captures Kris, nets him in a visual hold. They meet in the middle of the hallway, standing in the center in a peeling square of linoleum.

"We need to talk." Adam hushes but he's twitching at every joint and kicking at the seam in the floor.

"I have a room. I mean, here, I've not been signed out or discharged." Kris hazards a guess but no one's told him to leave.

They float toward the larger, corner room like ghosts exiting except for that they are drawing further into the hospital. Kris opens the door to the empty room, stares at the rumpled bed, and doffs off his sneakers. He climbs into the bed and crosses his legs as if he's awaiting direction, and he probably is. When Adam shuts the door quietly and shoves the visitor's chair under the latch as a make-shift lock.

Maybe Kris is the one down the rabbit hole because he can't wish this into being what he craves. Adam's coming down off an adrenaline high because he thought his friend was dead; Adam is not thinking about pushing Kris into the mattress and driving his— but Adam is closer now, his hands on Kris shoulders to leverage his balance.

He looks Kris over with hesitation. "I gotta know that you really want this,” Adam says. “I need to know that this is as real as I want it to be." He stops abruptly. "I need to know that you want me because I am about to do something beyond the pale of stupid so I'd like to know we're in this together."

Kris shakes his head and then nods, slowly slotting the words together so that they make sense. What is Adam looking for from him? Is Adam crazy? God help him if Adam tries to take it back now and Kris decides he's not responsible for any violence that may erupt if, well, if this isn't true.

Kris' throat burns from holding back on all of the things he wants to say, but somehow he manages, “I do, I am. Adam, if you aren't saying that you lied before, I will kill you in my own humiliation.” It sounds as he intended: light with an edge of whetstone to sharpen knives.

Adam grins, says, "You'd be forced to live in obscurity because my fans would want your head." More seriously, he recants. "I lied, lied so badly that I thought you knew but decided that it was a way out."

Kris shakes his head furiously. He wants to punch Adam in the throat but delays when his hand skitters over Kris' cock, fingers linger over the head, bluntly bulging through the denim. “Let me? Let me this time, just me on you, My mouth?”

Is that really a question? Kris pulls him closer with a rough tug and kisses the stubble studding Adam's jaw before moving up to his lips. He expects it to be nothing like his fantasies about kissing Adam because fantasies conveniently omit bad breath, teeth clanking in a lip mash, and neck pain after being plastered together in one position. The kiss slides into kisses when Adam pushes Kris back into the bed and mouths at his neck, moving up to his temple. Kris is right that's it is nothing like one of his backstage jerk-off fantasies.

Adam trails his hands down and up under Kris' tee-shirt until he thumbs the waistband of Kris' jeans. _His mouth_. Oh. For as much as he wants this, he figured they'd get to it, eventually, but not here, not right now, but Kris can't imagine complaining.

Kris allows Adam to tug at his fly until he shoves Adam away so he can peel himself out of out of the stiff denim. The jeans drop away as Adam moves into Kris' space. Kris tosses the blankets away as Adam grasps the base of his cock, squeezing lightly. Kris bucks into the touch, gasping for air as Adam pushes the tip of his tongue into the slit, before swirling around the crown, licking at the pre-come.

Kris rakes his fingers through Adam's mussed hair after throwing the ridiculous hat across he room. Adam has him stretched out and taut, toes curling up before pointing out again, his other hand fisting the bleached sheets.

“Relax, Kris, just relax into it.”

Kris bites his lip, the blood tastes like the twisted metal of the accident that didn't touch him at all, but Adam— He shivers into the pain of the bite while bowing up into Adam's touch. Kris coaxes himself to go limp under Adam's hands when Adam pulls himself toward the foot of the cot-sized bed and nips at Kris' hip bone. Adam's mouth swallows him down until his lips meet the circle of his thumb and index finger. He sucks Kris against his tongue, leaving trails of saliva that he follows back down like he's chasing an elusive note. Yes, Kris has imagined this since they had shared the bedroom in the mansion but every fantasy pales, flakes into ash and flies away as Adam's enthusiasm mingles with Kris' need to trust Adam with this part of him. Kris grinds his ass in the bed as Adam's mouth plunges down again so that most of Kris' cock is embedded against his tongue before he tapers off slowly to lap at the crown, swirling under to lick at the pulsing vein.

Kris jerks against Adam's mouth, catching his teeth, as he tries to warn him but Adam only goes deeper and pushes his thumb into the tender skin behind Kris' sac. Flinging his arm over his mouth, he comes, biting into the skin below his elbow to keep from crying out. Kris waits for Adam to pull off, but he continues to suck at Kris' softening cock, coaxing the last drop from the slit. It almost hurts as Adam licks the sensitive skin clean before he carefully moves away and finds his way back up to Kris' mouth. He swoops in, pushing his tongue into Kris' mouth along with the last vestiges of Kris' orgasm. Kris buries himself in the kiss, tangling his tongue with Adam's, tasting his come mixed with Adam's lip gloss. Twisting together, pulling at clothes until they fall off, they kiss until they're dry and chapped.

"I thought I lost you." Adam looks away, checking that the door is still firmly shut with the chair nudged against it.

"I know. I thought the same thing, or some thing like it." _I didn't think we'd ever be here, like this without another rock to chip away at or climb._ There are so many things Kris wants to say but part of him is with that rock waiting for it to push between them.

"You'd never have lost me. You'll never lose me." Adam relates this as fact, his tone dry in sandwiching it between _water is wet_ and _the sun rises too early in the day (for me)_.

Kris dwells briefly on his wedding vows; he thought he'd never lose Katy, but he hadn't lost her— they gave each other away. He cards his fingers through Adam's hair, twisting the locks into curls that fall out after seconds. "I know. We— I am not sure what we are, but this feels good."

Adam snickers. "I've heard that before." The last word barely spoken before his smile softens and he cups Kris' cheek like he used to do so casually after one of their full-on bear hugs that ate up the Idol stage and he needed Kris to look up at him.

Did anyone realize why they needed that eye contact during all of those elimination shows? During every stop on the tour? No. Maybe. Kris shrugs it off because they'll never be sure of when it all changed. Or, if it ever changed because Kris doesn't feel changed; he doesn't love Adam differently now than he did after they met in Hollywood. A more intense love now, but not much different from that first Hello // How are you? // Just fine // Happy to make it to Hollywood. Handshakes linger, their faces crinkle with laughter.

"I've always loved you," Adam says, filling up the empty parentheses curled between them.

Somewhere between never and never enough, Kris doesn't need to know where they begin and end or count the numbered days. From the first, from that moment, from _this_ moment.


End file.
